


A Short Meta on Writing Cora

by salamanderinspace



Category: Axiom's End - Lindsay Ellis
Genre: Character Analysis, Gender, Gender Issues, Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:28:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27607642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salamanderinspace/pseuds/salamanderinspace
Summary: Cora Sabino has an interesting psychology.  People have criticized her as a protagonist, but she is actually very complex.
Relationships: Ampersand/Cora Sabino
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	A Short Meta on Writing Cora

On the first page of Lindsay Ellis' novel "Axiom's End" we're introduced to the protagonist, Cora Sabino. The first thing we know about her is that she's a working class millennial, probably from an upper middle class family. She could afford to go to college and to buy a car, but not a great one. She's been a bit irresponsible - spending her money on concerts (to keep her from falling into the precipice of despair, one imagines) instead of car repairs. The next thing we learn about her is she's observant, possibly hyperobservant from some kind of anxiety. She notices a black town car tailing her mom on the way to work. 

Cora and her mother, Demi, don't seem to have the best relationship. It seems like a typical boomer/millennial family bond; the mother presumably has no awareness of the state of the economy, and therefore thinks her child is a lazy failure. This belief serves to justify the mother's impetus to do what she was already going to do, which is withhold help and support from her daughter ("from now on you take the bus.") I have my theories about why a woman would act this way. Women of Demi's generation were programmed to have children, they were socialized to believe it was a vital part of the human experience. When she discovered that child rearing wasn't the blessing it was made out to be, Demi came to resent her children, to be angry at them for their neediness and their autonomy. 

Demi also uses denial as a coping mechanism for structural violence. "If they are, I'd rather not know," she says of government surveillance. This is an environment that can lead to some amount of gaslighting for Cora. It's not imperative, but the attitude of "if I see it, it doesn't exist" tends to lead to that family situation. The structure of our society puts minors in a situation where they are expected to trust and submit to their parents, so they end up forced to accept that same separation from reality that their parents are choosing to experience. It's a brutal process if you care about truth; you might come to care less about truth than you care about survival.

This is relevant also in Cora's relationship with her father, who is a Julian Assange-like figure leading a group of hacktivist revolutionaries who have proof the government has been covering up aliens. "Truth is a human right" is Cora's father's mantra. His name is Nils, and he is the third character introduced in the story, though he is absent from the plot entirely. He is first mentioned on a radio program Cora overhears in Chapter 1 - Nils Ortega, a man largely left mysterious for the moment. A few pages later we will discover he is Cora's father. Still later it is revealed that he abandoned the family several years ago to flee the country. Cora and Demi moved in with his mother, for financial reasons. Despite his absence, Nils obviously cares about Cora, and regrets having to be apart from her. She's still quite angry with him, of course, and she never completely overcomes that anger. We as an audience are kind of supposed to see Nils as a shitty dad. The activists/revolutionaries of the story are painted as power-hungry, manipulative narcissists, and he is no exception.

So back to Cora. By far the most central character of the story is Cora. She's the only POV for this novel, which is always an ambitious accomplishment. So who is this girl? Well, she's polite. When Sol Kaplan, CIA agent, tells her to have a seat, she does. She's media savvy. She knows about Batman; she plays Avril Lavinge and Ani Defranco and the Beatles on guitar. She likes Star Wars. She's practical in a crisis; when the "alien" breaks into her house, she gets her siblings to safety. Her first priority in the morning is to find the dog. She's brave. She values her family. She also values music. She's a college dropout. She's a tiny bit bland - in that she does, in most situations, what any reasonable person would do, and she feels what any reasonable person would feel. Nothing more specific. But a bland protagonist is good. Screenwriters are trained to write bland protagonists, because the audience can project themselves onto them. I do think she is notable in her empathy - she seems to have a great understanding of what the aliens are feeling - but it doesn't go too far beyond what I'd expect from a girl her age.

You'd think a girl named Cora - daughter of Nils Ortega, resident of southern california - would be a latina. This is not mentioned or explored at all in the story. Ellis misses a major opportunity to discuss her protagonist's race, to de-blandify her. In an author's note Eliis explains that "Cora" comes from the name "Kore," which is a reference to the Goddess Persephone in Greek myth. This is extremely central to the plot. The myth of Hades and Persephone is, to put it very shortly, a story about a young girl who is abducted by the God of the Underworld (older, powerful, Other) and how she comes to be pretty fine with that. Like the Beauty and the Beast myth, it is a story to help young girls become more comfortable with arranged marriage and their general powerlessness over their own bodies. It celebrates the inherent power and agency in ... choosing to do exactly what society, your parents, and your husband tell you to do. I find it problematic, but a lot of women find it very empowering.

As the Hades/Persephone trope has evolved over time it's become popularly known/categorized as the "Monster Boyfriend" trope. In this trope, a young, innocent girl - generally she's skinny, and white, and pretty - is whisked away into a whole other world by a violent Monster who soon becomes her boyfriend. He can be a vampire, a werewolf, a hideous beast, or in the case of this story, an alien. The important thing these stories have in common is that 1) she is the only one who truly understands him, connects to him and 2) he is violent, powerful, and kind of an ass, but he's not usually that way to HER. Again I find this fairly problematic. If a man is mean to the waiter, he's not going to be nice to you. It's a rather romanticized (disconnected from reality) kind of story.

So what kind of girl falls for this Bad Boy? This violent, scary other? Well, lots of different ones, including me when I was younger. It's an incredibly popular romance trope. I can only mine my own psychology for an explanation, a context. I think young girls learn very early on that boys are socialized to be violent, and dominating. They are threatening, they are frightening. Being a girl who is attracted to boys is very like being attracted to something monstrous. Notice that the Monster Boyfriend is almost always bigger and stronger than the female protagonist. Fear is an arousal state; fear and desire play the same way in our bodies. Some of this desire is natural and genuine and some of it is ... socially encouraged. You see, we are told that WE are the ones with power over them; that if a boy is picking on us, it's because he "likes" us. We are told that we can use our looks to get men to do things for us, that men are less threatening/powerful if they are attracted to us. So we learn to treat these threatening/powerful entities with flirtation and compassion and invitations to intimacy as a way of preventing them from hurting us. This is framed as our "power." The logical next step is to turn to all the male characters who anthropomorphize scary things, like Death and the Devil, and say, "you have no power over me." But generally the way we say this is by earning their protection and approval.

This is just one explanation for why a girl could, in a matter of days, go from being abducted and violently attacked by a man to being sort of in love with him. The culture grooms us for that. She's curious about the other. She feels empowered by the fact that HE is scared of HER, that HE needs HER. His needs are the important ones in the relationship, and it is fine if he lies or kills or coerces to fulfill them. She of course doesn't expect he would do these things to HER - though he usually does, in the course of a Monster Boyfriend story. She forgives him. He makes her feel all tingly.

Cora is a girl who is just trying to survive, to grasp a tiny bit of comfort in a very confusing world. She's used to being forced to trust people who don't necessarily have her best interests at heart. She's also used to taking care of others - her siblings, for instance. She sings her sister to sleep because her mother is too drunk. She's used to putting aside her own needs, to negotiating and compromising and submitting. These are valuable skills, and it is not Ellis' fault that they are skills that are only taught to and valued in girls. 

The next step in a great Monster Boyfriend story is for Cora to discover her own power. At some point she needs to decide she doesn't need the alien; she has to make a choice for herself about what is right. Are the revolutionaries right? Is Cora going to tell her story to the press? Is the CIA right? Is Cora going to join the government in keeping the aliens under wraps? Obviously she wants to survive the upcoming alien invasion, but - survive for what? Does she want to explore the galaxy, to become a great musician? To settle down and have babies? To get railed by her monster boyfriend? It's brought up a few times in the book, this question of "what are we surviving FOR?" and it's never answered.

One final note. A lot of girls I know who appreciate the Monster Boyfriend trope tend to identify more with the monster than the girl. This is a totally understandable exploration of power fantasy, and in my opinion the best thing we can do as writers of fanworks is WRITE FEMALE MONSTERS! If you are thinking of writing a Cora/Ampersand fic, may I humbly suggest that you consider including a throwaway line where Ampersand points out that actually, "she/her" is more accurate, if you're going to impose a human gender onto an alien at all.


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